Ataphoi
by The Readers Muse
Summary: There were bloody footprints leading up the smooth-grained stairs towards the front door.


**Disclaimer:** I don't own "Olympus has Fallen," "London has Fallen" or "The Walking Dead." That is all someone else's playground.

 **Authors Note #1:** This story is based after the canon events of "Olympus has Fallen" and "London has Fallen," and is loosely based in "The Walking Dead" universe.

 **Warnings:** zombie apocalypse au, adult content, adult language, canon typical violence, blood, gore, injury, minor character death, pre-slash.

 **Ataphoi**

There were bloody footprints leading up the smooth-grained stairs towards the front door. Almost a week later and it still looked surreal. Sun-baked to the grey-top, but somehow still fresh enough that he could almost trick himself into believing it'd all just happened. That he hadn't just been clicking the lock on the car, tired and dragging ass from two back to back shifts when he'd caught sight of them.

"Mike," Ben murmured behind him. A mess of vibrating bones and muscle. Stinking to high heaven, just like him. Slick with blood and sweat and more than a few other things that threatened to turn even his stomach. Things like the stale tang of vomit that was still speckled across Ben's shoes as he hovered behind him. Suit jacket gone and arms trembling with exhaustion as he held up the shotgun they'd found in the trunk of a smashed police cruiser and covered their flank.

Secretary McMillian had already been bitten by the time they'd found her. Before they'd figured out that it was the bites that turned you. _The bites that brought you back._ The Glock in her hand had wavered, shuddering with a terrified sort of palsy that made him realize just how bad it must have been. Staining the carpet underneath her a darker shade of red as she hissed relief through her teeth – recognizing them over the flimsy barricade of an overturned desk and a handful of computer chairs.

His hands had ghosted over the blood-stained shirt someone tied tight around her calf with the familiarity of long practise. Only shying away – instinctive and with tightly sealed lips – when a harsh, liquid-filled rattle issued from deep in her chest as she shook her head. Fever-hot hands slapped his away with her usual aplomb. Eyes unfocused. Skin ashen. Hair sweat-tacked to her face as the crumpled body of one of the senior press secretaries remained where it'd fallen in the doorway opposite. With a neat bullet hole drilled through her right cheek and a ripped open throat that gleamed dull-crimson in the low emergency lights.

"Don't bother with it. Tom is coming back, he's- any minute now. The ambulance is on it's way," she wheezed, adding a bleary _"sir"_ to the end as President Asher materialized behind him. Looming with hunched shoulders through the thinning smoke and chipped plaster-haze. Shell-shocked and streaked with soot and someone else's blood.

"Ruth- Ruth, what happened?" Ben whispered, responding to his sudden closed fist when a sound - heavy like footsteps - echoed down the hall behind them. "Hey…hey, look at me. That's good. We'll get you fixed up. Ruth, who did this? What-"

A baser growl carried from further down the hall as a distant explosion shuddered through the foundations, back in the direction they'd just come from. Running full tilt from a group of those- those- _things_. Monsters wearing familiar suits and familiar earpieces. All of them had been torn into somehow, bleeding and animal. Familiar faces with names he'd called out before they'd turned around and-

"Is it one of them?"

He hadn't been able to tell and he hadn't been inclined of wait around and find out either. Instead he'd just bitten off a curse and pulled the woman to her feet. Wincing as her muffled cry of pain carried and the footsteps paused. Lighting a fire under both their asses the same moment the Sectary of _fucking_ Defense fainted quietly in his arms. Head lulling weakly as Ben came around her other side. Keeping her upright between them as they turned the corner and hurried towards the emergency elevator.

"Come on, sir. Let's get her to the bunker. The Emergency Response team is waiting for us there. They have a first aid kit. The doctor-on-call. Supplies. We'll be able to contact the Pentagon and figure out what the hell is going on."

He remembered looking down at the radio crackling static as it fell from her free hand. Leaving it there on the carpet as shadows moved eagerly in the haze behind them. Shambling and stumbling. Drawn by the sound as the static abruptly cut off and a yell - human and terrified in pitch - warbled through the white noise before getting cut off as quickly as it'd started.

It didn't exactly fill either of them with confidence.

 _What the hell was going on out there?!_

* * *

Twelve hours later he put a bullet in her brain when she turned in the back room. She still had her teeth buried deep in the throat of what he guessed was the only doctor left alive in around fifteen square miles when she went down. Snarling at him with a liquid gurgle before the force of the bullet flung her head back and splattered brain-matter across the white-washed brick.

It wasn't the first death he blamed himself for.

And it wouldn't be the last.

* * *

A week later, the bunker was compromised and the satellite feeds where showing a large concentration of undead moving towards the capitol from safe zone Alpha-six and Tango-zero. Overrun just after the CDC announced that it'd received viable samples and were working on a cure.

For the second time in President Asher's tenure, the White House fell. Olympus had been cracked open and ripped apart from the inside. Bleeding out in an entirely new and terrible way as the reports came pouring in from all over the country. All of them pointing to the exact same thing. The dead were walking and they were hungry. They couldn't be reasoned with or tamed. They were animals wearing your friend's skin. Your mother's. _Your wife's._ And if they got you- _if they bit you_ \- you died and became one of them too.

The only difference was that this time around, he had Ben with him from the get-go.

And honestly, that was the only reason he figured his heart was still beating at all.

* * *

They got out just before the crowd of dead reached the military barricades. Losing the others to the dead along the way until it was just them and the alien quiet. Still getting status reports from the military bases that were still functional as they were advised from the air which routes were clear and which were impassable. Vice President Trumbull was safe and coordinating Conner's evac from the last safe zone still standing in Los Angeles.

But that was about the only thing that was going right.

The country was in the toilet and they still had to make it to the rendezvous point with Air Force One.

Somehow.

It'd been the worst kind of deja vu when they finally made it out of the bunker. Differing only in the oddest of places. Like how instead of machine gun fire in the residential wing, there was the sharp glint of a rib-cage blossoming from a shredded suit jacket. Expression warped into an eternal scream - like the man had still been alive when they'd started eating him – as it raised it's arm towards them. Fingers curled like bloody claws as it's mouth opened and closed. Clacking teeth behind mangled lips.

Ben had called the creature by name before he'd put his knife through it's brain.

Which honestly only made it worse.

Because he could cope if the monsters remained nameless.

If they were just the enemy instead of fallen friends.

 _Family._

And he figured Ben could sense it too, because he barely moved out of range of his belt-loops. Staying close as they crept through a side entrance and hunkered down in the tiny space between the outside wall and the rose bushes. Waiting until the wind shifted and the mortars still burning on the south lawn sent a plume of smoke their way. Using it as cover as they streaked across the green and out into the chaos of the wreck-littered street.

He shook himself free of the past few days the same moment his fingers remembered the zapping charge that darkened an electrical burn across his cuticles when he'd hot wired an abandoned military Humvee and crashed them through the burned out safe zone with some of the dead that'd had them surrounded seconds before still clinging to their bumper.

He flipped the bird to protocol not long after that. Drawn back to those bloody footprints on his front porch like they were some sort of fucked up homing beacon. There was something he had to do before they left. Something he hadn't been strong enough to do the first time. He knew he'd get his ass chewed out if the office ever found out, but he was long past caring. And just like he knew he would, Ben hadn't said a word about it when they'd pulled into the driveway. Acting like it was just another day in the middle-class suburbs of Washington as he followed him up the driveway and around the garage. Passing the overturned trash can he'd knocked over the first time, half falling down the stairs as bloody tears had blurred his vision. Both of them acting like Air Force One wasn't gassed and waiting for them on some distant runway and the entire world wasn't falling apart at the seams. Like the President of the United States didn't have anywhere better to be while the death toll rose and city after city went dark.

They slipped in through the backyard. Through the sliding glass door that was still unlocked, smeared with bloody handprints from the inside. Stepping over the shards of the broken vase. The tensor trail of bandages still caught on the end of the stairway banister. Quietly grabbing the note from the counter. The one weighed down by an empty bottle of water. Scribbled thick with Doris' hurried handwriting- _Mike, if you're reading this- trying for the coast. Have baby. Be safe. Don't go upstairs- Love-_ and stuffing it in his breast pocket.

Ben was still looking around, curious and soft in an exhausted sort of way, when one of the floorboards upstairs creaked. And just like the first time, his heart sank like the floorboard had a sting that connected to the center of his chest.

 _Don't go upstairs._

 _Don't go upstairs._

 _Don't go upstairs._

"Mike."

He raised his gun, halfway up the landing before he realized he'd feet were even moving. Compartmentalizing. Focused. Alert. Like a good little soldier boy.

"Mike."

Ben was behind him. One hand heavy on his shoulder like that wicked left hook which usually made an appearance in the ring at the end of a particularly frustrating week. Refusing to disappear when he gritted his teeth and tried to shrug it off. Wanting to rip it off. To throw a punch. To bury his fist so deep in the wall that he could feel the life in the dead cords and wires. To run away from the small shuffling steps still sounding out upstairs - the ones he should have known like breathing but now couldn't place - and never look back.

"It doesn't have to be like this," Ben started. Standing there with him, halfway up the stairs. Surrounded in the sights and smells of the home he and Leah had made together. Now surreal and jarring as their shoes smeared blood and oil-tracked dirt across the cream carpet Leah had fallen in love with at the store. The ones he'd never actually gotten around to seeing until the day he walked in and found them installing it.

"There has to be another way. What if this can still be cured somehow? What if she might be-"

Somewhere outside a car alarm blared. Making them wince and instinctively duck away from the windows. Knowing the infected would be drawn to the sound. Knowing it would make getting out of the lane more difficult than the first time. Knowing-

"You know it's too late for that- even if they do. Its too late for her," he rasped, voice a mess of tone-deaf flats and painful dryness.

It was the right thing to do. But more than that, it was what he needed. He needed this part - the part of him that was slowly dying along with her - to be severed. And if that was selfish, then fuck- he'd always been a selfish bastard anyway. He'd never been able to give up the job. Never been able to make her happy in that way he had a feeling he should've. She'd always come second when she should have come first. And now he was going to-

The hand on his shoulder firmed. Strength. Recognition. Grief. Respect.

"It doesn't have to be you."

"Yes it does," he returned, swallowing each word down like it was glass as they crested the last step and stood awkward and close in the hallway. Watching the shadow moving through the gap between the door and carpet as a rattling moan issued into the silence. "I can't leave her like this."

* * *

Mike's hand was still on his shoulder when he opened the bedroom door and the thing that'd once been his wife whipped around to face him. Her eyes were milky this time. Pajama pants stained rust-red with old blood as the bite on her forearm glowed ruby slices across blue-veined pale. He didn't think he could have pulled the trigger otherwise.

* * *

It wasn't until they were on the road again - Ben sleeping fitfully in the back against a crate of bottled water and military ration packs - that he let his eyes rest on the city's reflection in the rear-view mirror. Choosing that moment as the one where he made everything equal, rather than when they'd burned rubber getting out of the street and onto the main road. Leaving his house – _their house_ – behind with barely a glance.

His lips twitched, blinking back the salt of overdue tears in favor and mashing the heels of his hands against his face. Swerving gently around the dark taillights of abandoned cars and the occasional screaming tangle. Knowing they couldn't stop – not for anything, not for anyone – as the comforting click of the radio issued from the dashboard. Reminding him that everything hadn't gone completely to shit. That somewhere in some lab, people were working on a cure. That somewhere close by, a plane was waiting on them. And that maybe, just maybe, his daughter might be-

"Good bye, Leah," he whispered finally.

But the terrible part was the transition between her name leaving his lips like a goodbye and his eyes falling on the shadows playing long across Ben's face was almost too close for comfort.

Looking back on it later, when Ben was wrapped around him with miles of bare skin and sheets that smelled like them and the tangy sweat-stale of unwashed things everywhere, it was easy to tell why.

* * *

 **A/N:** Thank you for reading, please let me know what you think. – This story is now complete.

 **Reference:**

Ataphoi (from αταφος, unburied): is a type of 'restless dead.' Meaning in this case: "those deprived of burial." Whatever the circumstances of death, a ghost could not achieve rest without the due funeral rights. These were importantly distinct from the mere insertion of the corpse into a hole in the ground, and indeed the concealment of a dead body in precisely this way is often presented as the chief obstacle to the peace of its soul.


End file.
